Notes for trust officers, private bankers and others concerned with estate and trust planning, from a Merrill Anderson Senior Editor and his retired mentor.

Monday, June 15, 2015

No Tax Reform? Blame Twitter!

Congress is in no mood to tackle tax reform this year, and nothing but the election will matter next year. Mitch McConnell sees no chance of action before 2017.

According to Stan Collender at Forbes, that's way too optimistic. The earliest realistic target date for tax reform is 2019. One reason: Twitter.

"Tax reform in the 1980s took three years, and that was long before there was Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and all of the other social media sites. *** Members of Congress who in the 1980s had to wait for the evening news to tell voters what they had done now will be tweeting out their remarks while they are being delivered."

In short, Collender believes, the next effort at tax reform will become a social media circus.